Six on Schools: Why I Don't Want My Kid in NYC's 'Best' Schools; NYC schools can open if local infection rate stays below 5%; Children must go back to school, but.; Randi Weingarten: ‘No way’ schools can return this fall without more funding; I’m a

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Six on Schools: Why I Don't Want My Kid in NYC's 'Best' Schools; NYC schools can open if local infection rate stays below 5%; Children must go back to school, but.; Randi Weingarten: ‘No way’ schools can return this fall without more funding; I’m a class scheduler in NYC. Here’s what I need to know to do my job

The Fight to Integrate New York City’s Specialized Schools Is Misguided

It affirms a supremacist mentality. I thought we were done propping that up.

Why I Don't Want My Kid in NYC's 'Best' Schools

Why I Don't Want My Kid in NYC's 'Best' Schools It affirms a supremacist mentality. I thought we were done propping that up.

NYC schools can open if local infection rate stays below 5% — but a spike could shut buildings down again, Cuomo says

If the city’s infection rate surges past 9% later in August or after the school year starts, schools will be forced to close.

"Gov. Andrew Cuomo laid out strict benchmarks New York City must meet before reopening schools this fall and will require buildings to shut down if there is a resurgence of the coronavirus in the area.

New York school districts will be allowed to reopen if the surrounding region has reached the fourth and final phase of reopening and the daily infection rate is below 5%, based on the proportion of tests coming back positive and based on a 14-day average, Cuomo said Monday. State officials will determine if New York City, which counts as its own region, has met that threshold in the first week of August.

But if the city’s infection rate surges past 9% later in August or after the school year starts (based on a seven-day average), schools will be forced to shut down again. Fewer than 2% of coronavirus tests in New York City have come back positive in recent weeks, state data show, though the city has not yet reached phase four of reopening.

“We’re not going to use our children as guinea pigs,” Cuomo said during a press conference, repeatedly criticizing President Donald Trump’s stance that school buildings should reopen across the board. “You can follow the number — that’s what’s nice about this. There’s no politics, there’s no personal opinion, there’s no vaguery.”

New York City schools, which announced a reopening plan last week, has not yet said how it would screen students or how it would address positive cases of the coronavirus at its school buildings. Last week, city officials said they don’t believe schools would have to close down — as they did before buildings closed in March — if a positive case pops up.

All school districts across the state are required to submit their reopening plans by July 31, which education officials must simultaneously make public. A spokesperson for the governor, Jason Conwall, said the state does not anticipate providing districts with more funding to aid their reopening plans, as the coronavirus has blown a hole in the state’s budget. Cuomo has previously warned that education cuts could be in the offing without additional federal stimulus money."

https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2020/7/13/21323308/nyc-schools-reopening-coronavirus-cuomo

Children must go back to school, but

No matter the precautions we put in place inside a classroom, we cannot open schools if there is significant community transmission. Period.

Even in countries where daily cases are low, schools are becoming an epicenter of community outbreaks and the ripples of those outbreaks permeate throughout the community at large.

In Australia, where they were reporting only 10-20 new cases per day for most of June, an outbreak in a school spread among teachers and students, and then radiated out into the community. By July 9, the outbreak included 58 students, 21 staff and 14 households -- a total of 119 new infections, with the number growing daily.

This outbreak, and other clusters developing around Melbourne, shut down a city of 4.5 million people for the next six weeks to suppress the outbreak.

There is a similar story in Israel, where officials closed nine schools and quarantined nearly 7,000 people after the diagnosis of 244 students and staff infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 infections. Dr. Udi Kliner, the top Health Ministry official in Israel who testified to the Israeli Parliament on July 7, said,

"Schools -- not restaurants or gyms -- turned out to be the country's worst mega-infectors." Members of Israel's cabinet have suggested that a second lockdown of the country may now be unavoidable.

If we open schools but don't open them safely, the ramifications are going to ripple throughout our communities -- well beyond the playground.

We must start by lowering community transmission. We must get new cases in our school districts low, very low. The average public school size in the US is 576 students.

If we are looking at a SARS-CoV-2 community-level incidence of 1-2%, as we are currently observing in some of our hotspots, then six to 11 students attending a typical public school will have an active infection, which could be passed to their peers and school faculty."

Children must go back to school, but....

Children must go back to school, but.... Opinion by Erin Bromage Erin Bromage writes that if we open schools but don't open them safely, the ramifications are going to ripple th...

This is how kids are learning the history of the French Revolution now (video)

"The latest Assassin’s Creed: Unity video game allows you, the player, to roam freely around an ancient city as part of its usual, incomprehensible plot about assassins, conspiracy, and revenge. But this time, the game is set in Paris during the French Revolution, and the game is sparking controversy in France for its depiction of perhaps the defining event of modern European history. ...

In fact, the debate over who are the heroes and villains of the Revolution goes back to the 1790s. British counter-revolutionary thought often focused on the suffering of the monarchy in their stories, such as the King’s tearful goodbye to his family before his execution on Jan. 21st, 1793 or Marie-Antoinette’s perhaps apocryphal last words to her executioner after stepping on his foot just before her head was cut off: “Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it.”

These stories ignore the fact that 80% of France’s citizens before 1789 were peasants, living in absolute squalor while a disconnected monarchy partied in Versailles, which often shocked foreigners who visited pre-revolutionary France. “The vast majority of French people who were not destitute lived under constant threat of becoming so, and were prepared to use violence to avoid such a fate,” said William Doyle in his book, The Oxford History of the French Revolution. The sans-culottes were violent—but they had their reasons."

Assassin's Creed's Depiction of the French Revolution Is Very Controversial

Assassin's Creed's Depiction of the French Revolution Is Very Controversial Kabir Chibber, Quartz With sympathetic noblemen and bloodthirsty common folk, the French Revolution-set Unity is re-igniting an histor...

Randi Weingarten: ‘No way’ schools can return this fall without more funding

Randi Weingarten: ‘No way’ schools can return this fall without more funding

Randi Weingarten: ‘No way’ schools can return this fall without more fun... Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said there’s “no way” schools across the...

I’m a class scheduler in NYC. Here’s what I need to know to do my job. - Chalkbeat New York

When assigning students to classes, there are always a lot of pieces to fit together. Now there are even more. 

https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2020/7/14/21323482/im-a-class-scheduler-in-nyc-heres-what-i-need-to-know-to-do-my-job